End of an era

Friends, Romans, customers, lend me your screens. I come to bury NoticeBored, not to praise it.

Sadly, the time has come to draw a lengthy chapter in our lives to a close.

Our monthly  security awareness and training subscription service will cease to be early next year. As of April 2020, it will be no more. It will be pushing up the daisies. We'll be nailing it to the perch and sending it off to the choir invisibule.


The final straw and inspiration for the title of this piece was yet another exasperating phisher:


... and the realisation that suckers will inevitably fall for scams as ridiculous as that, no matter what we do. There will always be victims in this world. Some people are simply beyond help ... and so too, it seems, are organizations that evidently don't understand how much they need security awareness and training. "It's OK, we have technology" they say, or "Our IT people run a seminar once a year!" and sure enough the results are plain for all to see. Don't say we didn't warn them.

We tried, believe me we tried to establish a viable market for top-quality professionally written creative awareness and training content. Along the way we've had the pleasure of helping our fabulous customers deliver world-class programs with minimal cost and effort. But in the end we were exhausted by the overwhelming apathy of the majority. 

As we begin the research for our 200th security awareness module, it's time to move on, refocusing our resources and energies on more productive areas - consulting and auditing on information risk and security, ISO27k, security metrics and suchlike.

We're determined that the gigabytes of creative security awareness and training content we've created since 2003 will not end up on some virtual landfill so we'll continue to offer and occasionally update the security policies and other materials through SecAware.com. The regular monthly updates will have to go though as there simply aren't enough hours in the day. "She cannae take it, Cap'n!"

Meanwhile these bloggings will continue. We're still just as passionate as ever about this stuff (including the value of security awareness, despite everything). We've got articles, books and courses to write and deliver, standards to contribute to, global user communities to support, proposals to prepare. 

Must go, things to do.